Hindu Temple offers Temple premises for Hurricane Rita Evacuees

pstrongIrving, Texas, September 24, 2005:/strong The Hindu Temple in Irving Texas, opened its doors for Hurricane Rita evacuees Thursday night. Many agencies like Red Cross, Texas 211, Texas Department of Public Safety were informed about availability of its premises for use as shelter./p pbr/When email's went out to Temple devotees, offers of supplies and help poured in, clogging the phone lines. Volunteers were busy redirecting calls about offers of help to their personal cell phones, so that the main lines could be left open for calls from evacuees and agencies calling to get latest capacity information./p p"It was heart warming to see two kids jumping up and down in joy, just because they could have a warm shower after being cramped in an ac-less pickup for 24 hours", said one of the volunteers./p pDoctors from the Hindu community were on call, and provided valuable assistance to evacuees who were pregnant, had stomach aches, flu-like symptoms, etc./p pCalls poured in from agencies as far out as California, trying to locate shelter for evacuees still on the road. Calls from Security company employees, Corporations, Government agencies, other charities trying to place evacuees was indicative of the enormous effort by the whole community. Updated lists of shelters with available space were all over the Internet, and thanks to agencies maintaining those lists, it was rather smooth to find shelters for evacuees that reached a full shelter./p pIn all, about 200 people found shelter at the Hindu Temple. When asked regarding his views about helping those in need, R.K.Panditi, a volunteer, said "The Gita has said that this kind of charity, with no expectation in return, is the best kind". Gita is one of the main holy books of Hinduism./p pbr/Dr. Jagannath Rao of the Hindu temple said "It was very encouraging to see so many devotees that showed up to help. Some volunteers had to be turned away." Manoj Parikh, President of the Temple said "Hindu temple is open for shelter to all Americans, and we are happy to see evacuees from all walks of life being served"./p p(Source: a href="http://www.dfwhindutemple.org/"www.dfwhindutemple.org/a )/p